Thursday, March 18, 2010

China Accused of Selling Bad Vaccines

A newspaper article by one of China’s best-known investigative reporters has reawakened a controversy over whether provincial authorities improperly stored vaccines in rooms without air conditioning, rendering them ineffective, and then let them be administered to children.

China’s Health Ministry said on Thursday that it would look into the report, by Wang Keqin in the China Economic Times, while cautioning that it had examined the evidence in late 2008 and not found a widespread problem.

But Chen Taoan, the former chief spokesman of the Shanxi Province Disease Control and Prevention Center and still on the center’s staff, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that a senior official there had been relieved of all duties at the end of last year because of improprieties related to the vaccines.

Mr. Chen said that the center, which is part of the Shanxi Health Department, had required all hospitals in the province to buy vaccines at steep prices. To monitor compliance by the hospitals, the center put a sticker on each package of vaccine to show that it had been approved.

But the stickers would not adhere to the packages in air-conditioned rooms, Mr. Chen said, so the center routinely through 2006 and 2007 had the vaccines transferred to a warm room where the stickers were attached, Mr. Chen said.

“I saw boxes and boxes of vaccines piled up high like a hill in a hot room without air-conditioning,” he said. “Over the course of two years, I complained more than 30 times to the center’s leaders that these vaccines were no longer effective.”

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This article is a good example of "how not to handle vaccines".

But you can look beyond the details. Basically, this was an ill-conceived compliance method that ended up destroying that which it was designed to protect....making it an even better example of "how not to do compliance".